China and the United States may produce so cheaply as to drive English goods out of the market. In that case the English taxpayer, who has paid £1,600,000,000, let us say, for the land, and has created the money by charging himself with interest to the amount of £44,000,000, may find himself every year losing £10,000,000 or £12,000,000 upon his purchase. It will not be easy to make up this deficit by increased taxation. A property-tax would fall largely upon the very class who are by hypothesis unable to pay rent. An income-tax, if it were severe, would drive the large class of Englishmen who have invested their savings in foreign countries to make their homes abroad. Confiscation of Church lands, large as the estates of the Church are on paper, would bring in very little, till the compensation due to actual incumbents had been paid off, and would be very unpopular in the country if money, heretofore spent in the parishes, was diverted to the Treasury for the benefit of non-resident fund-holders. Put it how we may, it is difficult to suppose that the pressure upon the taxpayer in such a case as has been assumed might not be very severe and long-continued.
Now, in such a crisis, it is difficult to believe—and this is the second danger—that the taxpayer might not be sorely tempted to draw a distinction between debts due to a foreign creditor and obligations incurred to fellow-countrymen. Forty years ago, a very able student of political economy proposed to declare the National Debt a 3 per cent annuity terminable at the end of a hundred years.[1] A great part of the National Debt had been contracted for what the writer regarded as immoral purposes; a great part had been raised in the most wasteful way; and the difference
- ↑ Professor F. Newman.
